As with all social media its greatest benefit is that it allows you to have a greatly extended reach: your profile can potentially expose you to thousands of visitors online. If you do it right and that’s a big if.

FaceBook Demographics

If you’re wondering exactly what is the potential for extended reach, consider that FaceBook has a whopping 175 million users: only 50 million of them are in the US and 9 million in the UK. So if you’re an international outfit, you need applications like FaceBook to make sure you’re getting the potential international coverage you need.

“Yeah, but all you get on FaceBook is kids obsessed with games and music…” Not so! The fastest growing demographic on FaceBook is the 33-40 year-olds, but the over 55s are close behind them. Those are powerful demographics for the business crowd aren’t they?

There are three very important rules you need to follow if you want to be a social media success: I’ll be repeating this later because it doesn’t just apply to FaceBook:

• Never, ever be aggressive or rude. If you wipe someone out on FaceBook chances are it will go viral because everyone loves a fight. But you will put people off doing business with you for good. Always be nice even if you disagree.
• Keep your readers engaged: include interesting stuff for them and…
• Give people something to take away. Nothing creates likeability than solving another person’s problems for them–for free.

You need to spend time connecting with people on FaceBook, and once you’ve done that you need to spend more time engaging with them. If you’re not prepared to do that then perhaps Social Media in all its glory simply isn’t for you.

Engage with your customers on a personal level

One of the hugest advantages of engaging with your customers through social media is that they get to see a side of you that they normally wouldn’t: you become a friend to them and everyone loves to do business with a friend. Successful FaceBook users, or Power Users, find that their business grows virally because they’re giving people what they want or need, so those connections go away and tell other connections to go check it out.

If you ever run into reputation problems online (if, in other words, you have someone publishing unpleasant stuff about you), a strong FaceBook presence can be a wonderful ally in your reputation management strategy. You can also use FaceBook for proactive reputation management. Which is basically making sure that the naysayers can’t get a foot in the door.

So what can you do to make sure that visitors find your FaceBook page engaging and useful?

• Industry news (trade shows, exhibitions, product recalls…you get the idea)
• Tips on using your products/services
• Stories about how your producst/services have helped people
• Stories about your employees and your customers
• Special offers
• You can link to or provide product reviews

One more very important point: you can also advertise directly on FaceBook. With numbers like 175 million and a great demographic you can be sure that your ads will come up in front of the right people. Highly targeted marketing like that is hard to come by.

Image Credits: Squidoo.com

You won’t start growing a Facebook community and learning what works and what doesn’t until you actually dip your toe in the water and get going.

2. Find a topic people care about

Yes, you’re trying to create a group to help your business. But make it all about you and you won’t have success in attracting people. Choose a hot or enduring topic or theme relevant to your industry, and you’ll have a much better chance at attracting and sustaining a community. Some examples: the Marketing 2.0 group the Bordeaux Colloquium focus on sustainability, the American Association for the Advancement of Science,

3. Be careful (i.e., be smart)

Don’t “spam” your Facebook group. By joining your group members have indicated their interest in connecting. Don’t turn them off by overwhelming them with self-interested messages.

4. Rewards help

Encourage participation by making special offers; e.g., discounts on your products or services for members of the Facebook group.

5. Create connection points

Enable and encourage personal connections between members by finding out and highlighting what individuals in the group are doing, working on, investing their time and energy in.

6. Create outreach programs

Reach out to other groups both on and off Facebook, to create and deepen affinity relationships with others.

7. Give the community a heartbeat

Invite interesting players in your industry to regularly scheduled events such as conference calls and webinars. Or create a contests, competitions, and surveys that involve members and drive participation.

8. Identify, appoint, and nurture ambassadors

Keep an eye out for particularly engaged members and then enlist their help in building and supporting the group. Appoint them as administrators, give them greater standing, and empower them to make decisions and promote the community.

9. Your name matters

What you call your group is important – choose a name, and by extension a topic and theme that people want to identify with and you’ll propel your growth by an order of magnitude. Think hard about your industry or category and try to key off a hot topic or emerging trend.

10. Watch what others are doing

There are some well-documented cases of companies successfully using Facebook groups. Among them: WorkLight Serena Software, Ernst & Young, and Towers Perrin. Study what they and others are doing and try out new ideas.

1. Build the Right Foundation

Set it up right. Make sure you choose a title, category and description that is most relevant to your brand or target demographic. Offer as much info as possible about your group including contact info, location, purpose. If you want to build real community, allow people to post comments, photos and/or videos in the group. You’ll likely want to make your group public so anyone can join.

2. Friends Build Friends

The best way to get people to join your group is through personal invitation – so get busy inviting your friends who are already in Facebook. Your friends’ friends will then notice that they joined a new group and may be interested in checking out the group.

3. Use Email to send Invitations

Facebook allows you to send group invitations to all of the contacts in your Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo accounts, so don’t forget to invite everyone who’s not already a Facebook friend.

4. Update Regularly

Don’t build your Facebook group then leave it to stagnate for 6 months. Update your news and photos and videos and comments regularly. Update your group bi-weekly or more if possible, depending on the nature of your group.

5. Promote Your Group Outside of Facebook

Promote your Facebook group on your website, in press releases, in your blog. Wherever you have a presence online is an opportunity to feature your Facebook group and invite people to join.

6. Be Human, Be Friendly

Welcome new members, send out periodic emails to your group, encourage them to invite their friends. Don’t abuse your members by spamming them with irrelevant information, but keep it focussed on the topic of your group. You’ll notice that many people who join your group will not already be your “facebook friend” — so send them an invitation to become your friend.